A Field Of Her Own

For 15 years now, women from small villages in Maharashtra have been fighting for property rights. Madhav Gokhale reports

CLAIMING INHERITANCE: Women attending a Laxmi Mukti rally; Sharad Joshi (below)

Manu might have waxed eloquent on why women should not be given independence (..na streem swatantrayamrhati, Manu Smriti) but no one seems to buying it any longer. Least of all, the 1.5 lakh farmer women of Maharashtra who have been battling for over 10 years for property rights.

Going by the name of Laxmi Mukti, the campaign was launched by the bureaucrat-turned-agronomist Sharad Joshi’s organisation Shetkari Sanghatana in the late ’80s. And it has travelled a great distance in these one-and-half decades from its beginnings in the obscure Vitner village in northern Maharashtra.

Since its inception, Laxmi Mukti’s emphasis has been on economic issues and, through them, women’s empowerment. Selling its revolutionary campaign to traditionally patriarchal farming communities in the hinterlands of agrarian Maharashtra, the Sanghatana began by establishing certain hard-to-refute facts: Women did two-thirds of the agricultural work and yet their plight was worse than landless and bonded labour. They held no assets, enjoyed no credit. To add to this, there was nothing to account for all the housework they did. ‘‘If there was a mechanism to gauge their contributions, it would probably run into astronomical amounts,’’ says Joshi.

Joshi has another interesting contention: That improvement in the economic situation of the household was often accompanied by deterioration in the quality of life of its womenfolk. For example, the green revolution increased farmers’ dependence on expensive inputs and technologies. Agricultural knowledge, which was once shared and disseminated between communities through the women, now came from multinationals or was rationed by states in the form of subsidies.

The Sanghatana’s first women’s rally at Chandwad pressed for counting domestic work by women while calculating the cost of agricultural production. The Chandwad Declaration took a serious view of the inequitable situation of daughters in all property disputes, the dowry system and the increasing harassment of women in property-related issues. The rural women also put forth a demand for, what they called, partnership rights in their parents’ and husbands’ households.

All this was, however, easier said than done. While anti-liquor campaigns or lobbying to get women elected to panchayat institutions (even pre-reservation) were comparatively easy, when it came to women’s property rights, the initial years saw little progress. ‘‘There are strong cultural inhibitions on the part of both men and women in accepting the very concept of women’s property,’’ explains Joshi.

Charity begins at home and so in 1989, a few Sanghatana members were encouraged to set aside a part of their land — not necessarily accompanied by documentary transfer of title — and turn over the gross proceeds to their wives for unquestioned use. That done, it was now time to initiate the campaign on the ground. Vimlatai Patel led the campaign for the first time in the tiny hamlet of Vitner, where titles to the plot were transferred to the wives.

Encouraged by the Vitner experience, the Sanghatana launched its Laxmi Mukti campaign on October 2, 1990. Farmers were urged to transfer part of their land to their wives with or without the formal transfer of title of the land, but with a formal conferment of the gross proceeds in her favour.

There was an enticement too. Village having at least 100 land transfers would be given the title of Lakshmi-Mukt village and by July this year, when the campaign was relaunched, more than 1,000 villages had carried out land transfers required for the title.

Joshi admits to initial legal hitches. For instance, in some cases, district authorities pleaded inability to approve the transfers. A state government decision on co-ownership of land has now partially resolved the problem. ‘‘The only unfortunate thing about this resolution is that women are given the status of co-owners, rather than independent owners,’’ lamentsJoshi.